Hacker News: harperlee

New comment by harperlee in "Nine-Inch Snails"

harperlee — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 11:03:30 +0000

Awesome way to show you’re not an LLM, by the way.

Why Most Developers Make Algorithms More Complicated Than They Need to Be

harperlee — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:15:16 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@flexianadevgroup/why-most-developers-make-algorithms-more-complicated-than-they-need-to-be-ab0ec8285803

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50118006

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A meta-analysis of 3 different notions of software complexity

harperlee — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 13:17:57 +0000

Article URL: https://typesanitizer.com/blog/complexity-definitions.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49598111

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by harperlee in "Trade (and Tariffs)"

harperlee — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:23:47 +0000

Arguably studying derivative works, such as a volume on economics, would be sufficiently acceptable as to void your calculation…

New comment by harperlee in "To become a better writer, read as much as you can"

harperlee — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:26:26 +0000

“Quantity has a quality in itself”. How many books can you read in your life, and how faithfully can you transcribe them, vs. just retaining a fraction of them? What about LLMs?

New comment by harperlee in "Logic for Programmers"

harperlee — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:00:08 +0000

FWIW, I'm on the email list of Hillel, and when discussing that the book is done, he said the following, which makes me thing otherwise:

    This marks the completion of a project that took five years of work, six bookwriting professionals, fourteen domain experts, and fifteen public alphas.

    This has been, without a doubt, the biggest and most exhausting project I've ever done. The examples in the discarded drafts alone could make a second book. The cursed knowledge I've gained on LaTeX and typography could fill a third (or at least a couple of entertaining blog posts). Self-publishing was simultaneously the worst and best decision I made.

    Now excuse me I am going to sleep for a month.

The Relatedness and Nestedness of Constraints

harperlee — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:54:37 +0000

Article URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40798-019-0178-z

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035698

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by harperlee in "The Birth of Prolog (1996)"

harperlee — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:39:52 +0000

There is some research around minikanren that touches exactly that (minikanren is akin to prolog written in scheme, where order is just an implementation detail, and cuts and other non-relational things are looked with suspicion).

New comment by harperlee in "Probably check on your smart appliances"

harperlee — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:51:11 +0000

Would be interesting to see a movement akin to Asahi / OpenWRT that enables me to run my side project on my fridge or tv!

New comment by harperlee in "No Spanish reading crisis?"

harperlee — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:38:47 +0000

I'm sure the general population being asked whether they read books have a very clear idea of what a book is.

New comment by harperlee in "You Don't Know Jack About Formal Verification"

harperlee — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:17:03 +0000

I don't know a lot about formal verification, but:

> So you can formally prove that your e-commerce refund management logic is correct, except for proving that you /processed the refund/. You can't even prove anything about recording the refund in your database, say nothing of proving anything about your interactions with your payment processor.

You could say the same thing about the viability of functional programming on a CRUD webapp, but languages like clojure have been used to great effect here. The fact that thera are important, even fundamental, bits that you cannot verify, doesn't take out value from the fact that you can eliminate whole dimensions of issues.

New comment by harperlee in "The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader"

harperlee — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 07:51:04 +0000

I won't hesitate to give this to my children, in a year or two when they are reading more fluently and don't need lots of pictures.

Price is also a factor here!

The reason enterprise AI is stuck

harperlee — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:58:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.fastcompany.com/91555415/real-reason-enterprise-ai-stuck

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611895

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by harperlee in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

harperlee — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:19:39 +0000

It was posted at 5am in New York... not sure that that was a US view, so the fact that the platform is US-owned doesn't seem so relevant, if there's a global audience.

That being said, I do agree it is a legit thought (and moreso, completely on point in the subthread discussing downsides), and that it shouldn't be downvoted.

New comment by harperlee in "French-Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis', dies at 56"

harperlee — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:54:39 +0000

"Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life"

The simple humanity in this candid description brought a small tear to my eyes. I'd say that the classical approach to this is a dry, clinical description of a depression stage, or a description of a how and not a why. Very welcomed in the age of AI slop!

New comment by harperlee in "Why AI Agents Cannot Change Software Systems"

harperlee — Thu, 28 May 2026 06:52:10 +0000

More strongly, if the pattern matching of a phenomenon totally / perfectly models the phenomenon, and you end up with a perfect model of the phenomenon, that enables you do do causal prediction, how can you NOT call it understanding? What more is there?

New comment by harperlee in "The real cost of owning a home"

harperlee — Wed, 27 May 2026 06:41:45 +0000

Don't know about your landlord specifically, and I'm no landlord, but there's also a bunch of people (including homeowners) that will wait until summer starts to test and then complain about HVAC... just on peak season for HVAC maintenance, where the waiting times are long (and the price will probably be higher).

New comment by harperlee in "Prolog Coding Horror"

harperlee — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:43:01 +0000

Then use them! Then those projects will cease having a single contributor or being unmaintained. This doesn't need to be a binary decision (either there is no risk or I won't use it), just choose the project / scope with knowledge that there is some risk in a small community; so internal use rather than client facing, specialized uses, etc.

New comment by harperlee in "Saying Goodbye to one line of APL"

harperlee — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:41:15 +0000

APL was designed to be written on a chalkboard (if I remember the story right). It is quite dense, and programs are quite small. Reading is slow and requires you to ponder about what was written. You can hold a lot of content in a small amount of 'ink'.

Now, an idea: HN is always complaining that an ipad (or any other tablet) is a consumption device, as it is not designed to be used with keyboard/mouse. Do any of you know if there is an app where you can write APL with a stylus, and has the ability to evaluate expression on the fly, similar to a repl? That would be an awesome thing to do.

New comment by harperlee in "Arena AI Model ELO History"

harperlee — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:21:49 +0000

Depends on the test design; is an agent competing against other agent in a given match, or against a test? Plus! Does the test's ELO fluctuate?